Iowa house swallowed in grain bin collapse

An Iowa family had a near miss when a collapsing giant grain bin buried their house under "thousands of bushels of corn", destroying the structure and trapping father and son in the wreckage. According to the Burlington Hawk Eye, the bin in Hillsboro, Henry County, failed structurally on Tuesday night at around 8pm while Jesse …

[Michael Prior-Jones]

Great foodstuff disasters...

This sounds not unlike the Great Boston Molasses tragedy of 1919... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boston_Molasses_Disaster

[Rob]

Daughter's name?

We have Jesse, Jennifer & Jordan, yet you didn't mention the daughter's name, i need to know if it begins with a J as well.

-Where's the Paris angle on this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was...

going to post a witty comment but I decided it was too corny.

[M Brown]

Damn English language

It always annoys me to see "near miss". So what, it was a hit then?

[Dave]

pop?

"Emergency crews quickly deployed a tractor to attempt to lift the remains of the structure and "high-powered blowers" to clear the corn"

were these blowers heated? would have made the evening more pleasant for onlookers to have some popcorn. With the mark-up on popcorn, they could have funded a new home for the family too. 12000 tonnes would be worth more than BillG once popped!

[Robert Harrison]

Never mind RoTM

This is RoTSFP(The Staple Food Products). Not as catchy I admit. Maybe the corn was fed up of being imprisoned by its evil human overlords.

Uhoh I think I hear the sound of black combine harvesters...

[Stuart Van Onselen]

Dangerous

Silos and similar storage tanks have featured prominently on the Discovery Channel lately, but only in doccies with titles like "World's Greatest Engineering Screw-Ups" or "Things That Broke and Killed People".

Clearly the damned things are dangerous, whether they contain giga-litres of fuel, or something as innocuos as molasses or corn. Plonking one within spitting distance from a residence is just *asking* to get yourself sued!

Where was the Risk Evaluation? The Environment Impact Study? The legal department saying "Are you bloody crazy?!?!?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of pics here

http://www.kcci.com/slideshow/slideshows/9626231/detail.html

[Les Matthew]

Re: I was...

"going to post a witty comment but I decided it was too corny."

There is more than a grain of truth in that.

Is it just me or is El Reg running like a dog atm?

[druck]

Stop talking the piss

<- Note

[Andrew Bolton]

American news article

Ed Yelland - pics are impressive, but that's from a spill on August 3rd 2006.

Was about to post on the priorities of yanks, vis the "...they will try to salvage as much as corn as possible." being the most important part of the story, and then noticed the date on the story :-)

Andrew

[James]

"with Jesse Kellet the only one of the pair to require unspecified hospital treatment"

So did Jordan Kellet require specified hospital treatment then? V. poor grammar, see me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Paris angle?

"Emergency crews quickly deployed a tractor to attempt to lift the remains of the structure and "high-powered blowers" to clear the corn"

"high powered blowers" - There's your Paris angle!

[C]

shouldn't the headline be ..

'Iowa farm house creamed by corn' - OR 'Iowa house popped by corn'

we all know that somehow M$ is to blame. It must have been one of those pre-alpha updates they're always slinging about.

But atleast they will have *plenty* of stuffing for the turkey!

[laird cummings]

@Rob; Daughter's Name

Actually, they broke the trend with the girl's name: Sheyanne.

Anyway, the flood punched the house clear off its foundation, moving it, entire, some 40 feet before collapsing it like a crumpled newspaper. Talk about your amber waves of grain!

[Anonymous Coward]

"thousands of bushels of corn"

"500,000 bushels" of corn - how many swimming pools?

"weighing around 12,000 metric tonnes, by our reckoning" - what's that in, eh, what's the El Reg unit for mass, actually?

"maybe 25 feet" - how many linguine?

Lester, you co-authored the El Reg measurement system, so please no more imperial units!

[Anonymous Coward]

Reg Measurements

Yep - maybe a handy calculator could be deployed !

[Mike Morgan]

good question

Where was the Risk Evaluation? The Environment Impact Study? The legal department saying "Are you bloody crazy?!?!?"

Let me ask George the younger and I will get back to you................

[Anonymous Coward]

Pictures Available

Pictures are available at

http://www.katu.com/news/national/11692461.html

and

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22799098-663,00.html

Enjoy!

[Schultz]

fishy units

There is a grain of truth in AC's comments:

You shouldn't use tons of units or units of tons,

just stick to the agreed-upon Reg standard.

Or maybe this is a deliberate pun because the

metric meter sits in PARIS and IT must be mentioned.

[Aubry Thonon]

Re: thousands of bushels of corn

Yah wanted elReg measurements?

500,000 bushels is about 7.04 Swimming Pools

12,000 metric tonnes is roughly 2,857 Kilojubs

25 feet is 54.43 Linguines

Ahhh, the joys of having plugged the elReg units of measurements into my unittab files. :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Houses and industry

While we have a different system here to control such things, it used to be that you could have an industrial site, with a large ventilation fan on a grain store, making a lot of noise, and people could get planning permission for a hour six inches from the store wall.

It's like the way councils will give you planning for a house on a floodplain.

Trouble is, unlike the floodplain the householder could then complain about the noise.

12000 tonnes is also a fair bit of traffic on and off the site--maybe there's a rail line as well--and 12000 tonnes in one batch sounds dodgy for all sorts of reasons: storage management, structural, vermin control, and handling.

But I've seen harvested grain in America just piled in a heap in the open air. You want cheap food, you'll ebd up with rat-piss and seagull-crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

So roughly 3067 acres worth

of corn (average yield 167 bushels per acre for Iowa) or 4.7 square miles of yellow grain in their house. How many nano-wales is that.

[BlacKSacrificE]

I for one..

..welcome our grainy, tasty when popped with a bit-o-butter-in-a-pan corn overlords.

Lester, I still want your babies. I knitted a teddy bear, and now i'm going to fill it with corn that we can kick it around to help me get rid of the stretch marks. its going to be so. damn. cool.

[Leon]

12,000 metric tonnes?

tonnes? What happened to El Reg's official standard for weight?!